Why the Labour Party loathes the pub

Oh the humanity, oh the magnanimity! Rachel Reeves has heard the cries of pain from the hospitality industry and swooped in to save us. Last week, the UK chancellor announced a whole 15 per cent – yes, 15 per cent – cut in business rates, and a freeze in real terms for the next two years. So it’s all sorted now. Pub closures will cease, and we’re all saved.

Except, there appears to be a slight problem with the inimitable Reeves’s maths. She boasts that the average pub will gain an extra £1,650 per year under her rescue package. But when combined with all the other taxes and levies we have to pay, to actually pocket that amount, publicans like me would need to increase our turnover by around £12,500.

Remember, pubs have also had to deal with the eye-watering rise in employers’ national insurance, new recycling fees, the minimum-wage bump, beer-duty rises, and much more besides. And none of that is easy to swallow in the current economic climate.

I already had to hike prices up by 20p across the board on 1 February just to stay afloat during the quietest time of the year. Hardest hit were my regulars – the lads who prop up the pub in lean patches and can least afford it. Now, with alcohol duty up 3.66 per cent as of this week, adding 38p to gin, 39p to whisky, 14p to wine, I’ll have to consider another price rise in April. That could kill my wet trade – or what’s left of it. Publicans are being slowly strangled.

It’s not just the till where there’s trouble – it’s the soul of the pub that’s under siege. Looming on the horizon is clause 20 of Labour’s Employment Rights Act, set to come into effect in October. This makes landlords liable for harassment and discrimination from ‘third parties’ on their premises, forcing them to police customer chit-chat lest someone say or do something untoward. The clause is the pettiness of the perpetually aggrieved made manifest.

As well as economic mismanagement by the chronically underqualified, there is an underlying rot in the Labour Party that leads it to loathe the pub – namely, a longstanding loathing for the white working classes’ habits, like their drinking and their smoking. It’s all rooted in the Methodist tradition of ‘bettering’ them, saving them from themselves. That nonconformist, chapel-bred disdain for ‘the demon drink’ never really left the party. It survived secularisation, survived New Labour’s champagne socialism, and it now endures in the spreadsheet puritanism of Rachel Reeves. Different vocabulary, same impulse – the English working class must be improved, disciplined, civilised.

Tony Blair tried to impose a Europe-inspired café culture on Britain with his 2003 Licensing Act. He hoped that 24-hour pub openings would lead to continental-style wine-sipping. But it ultimately backfired, simply allowing longer binge-fests. Ironically, it was Covid-era grit, outdoor setups, pop-ups, and the hospitality sector’s refusal to die that brought us closest to achieving the Blairite apparatchiks’ continental fantasies.

The pub – loud, unashamed, frequented by men with kebab-in-hand, occasionally vomiting in the taxi rank – doesn’t fit the new Britain. That’s why it terrifies Labour and its ilk. More than economic mismanagement, Labour’s assault on publicans is cultural sabotage, driven by the lanyard-wearing puritans’ abhorrence (and fear) of the plebs. ‘If only they’d live the way we want them to, everything would be fine’, they lament. But from Brexit to boozing, the ungrateful lot keep letting them down.

Pubs are central to Britain’s grand traditions of free speech and assembly, rights that were hard won over centuries. From Levellers plotting in smoky taprooms to Chartists stirring revolt over bitter, the public house is woven into our history. For centuries, it’s been our heart – a place to be, meet, laugh, sing and shake off the day’s nonsense. No one wants to be lectured about the health risks of sharing a few pints with friends. However much muesli you eat or yoga positions you contort yourself into, none of us are getting out of here alive. Maybe if the new puritans tried living a bit between birth and death, they might find a pub they enjoy, too.

With one pub closing every day in 2025 (that’s 366 shuttered for good) and even faster losses forecasted for 2026, the outlook is bleak. There will be no revival once they’re gone. We will have lost something profoundly us: something distinctly British, English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh.

In the pub’s wake will be sterile coffee shops and scrolling. Or, as our governing classes call it, ‘progress’.

Rory Hanrahan manages three village pubs with his wife in Oxfordshire.